On Monday, the second season of AMC’s The Terror kicked off with a spooky introduction to a supernatural horror plaguing a Japanese-American community during World War II. As with the inaugural season, The Terror: Infamy blends a fictionalized horror story with the true horrors of history. While it centers around Chester Nakayama’s (Derek Mio) treacherous journey, Infamy follows numerous members of the Terminal Island community. Most notable of which is elder Yamato-san, played by veteran actor George Takei, best known for his role as Sulu in Star Trek.
For Takei, who also served as a consultant this season, Infamy is personal. As a Japanese American, he lived in an internment camp during childhood.
“Four years. The extent of World War II. I mean, first of all, it’s irrational to sweep up a group of people just on the basis of race, whether we’re guilty or not. They just rounded us up, 120,000 of us. Then, when the war ended, suddenly we’re okay, and we’re let go,” Takei explained to us. “Equally irrational was to let us go if what they said… they said we’re all potential spies, saboteurs, and fifth columnists, and suddenly the war ends, and we no longer are that threat.”
“It’s been my mission in life to raise the awareness of it for the last 50 years. I’ve been speaking at universities all over. We founded a museum called the Japanese American National Museum,” Takei says of activism on the subject and his lack of hesitation in accepting showrunner Alex Woo’s offer to be involved with this series. Because of his commitment to that awareness, Infamy bears a serious level of authenticity. “I worked with the writing team, shared with them my personal experience and what I learned as an adult through my research and my lecturing, and I brought them to the Japanese American National Museum. Dramatic writing involves finding metaphors, symbols, and I thought seeing some of the craftsmanship of the things that people produced, whether they be furniture or decorative elements, or a sculptural art creation, that might inspire them.”
“Then, once we began filming on the set, I was able to authenticate some of the details. I mean, this is a film, and the sweep of the camera won’t catch many details, but the devil is really in the details. For example, the crockery that we had in the mess hall, and the research that the set designers and the costume designers did is really intensive and was very accurate. The recreation of the internment camp built on six and a half acres was amazingly accurate and, for me, it took me back to my five-year-old, six-year-old, seven-year-old days. It was nostalgic for me, because my real memories are that of a child. My knowledge of the internment itself came from my adult studies and talking to various survivors of the internment.”
It’s not just the historical context that’s accurate, but the cultural as well. Specifically, the kaidan. Takei breaks it down, “There’s so much of this show that is little known. The very subject of the internment is little known, but the kaidan genre is centuries old. It’s the telling of ghost tales and it’s the form of old Japanese literature that, in contemporary, modern Japanese cinema, has been interpreted as well. So, the horror tale is an old cultural form. It’s certainly a part of 20th century storytelling in Japanese movies. There are kaidan movies that deal with ghosts, and because the internment story involves immigrants from Japan, they also bring with them the old country customs, beliefs, legends, lores, storytelling, and myths.”
Takei also has a little personal experience with kaidan, “My grandparents did tell me some ghost tales as well as folk tales, but not to the extent of the immigrant generation that’s depicted in The Terror: Infamy. These people lost everything, and the stress of the injustice put stress on marriages, father/son or mother/daughter relationships, and at times like that, the belief in spirits and spirits coming to punish us for whatever evil that we may have done in the past comes into play. I myself didn’t grow up with that kind of belief or superstitions, but I was mindful of that. It didn’t play a big part in my life.”
When asked if Takei felt the supernatural elements make the true horrors of this series easier to digest, he answers, “Oh, no. It intensifies it. These people are immigrants who have their old country myths and beliefs and superstitions, and when they’re being tortured under these incredible circumstances, they’re clinging on to some of that and intensifying their fear and their terror and their uncertainty is drama.”
New episodes of “The Terror: Infamy” air Monday nights on AMC.
